The state of TV "news" in many cases is an optical aberration of journalistic integrity. What bothers me most is when three or four news celebrities (especially during the morning) sit around and gossip among themselves about current events, decide the guilt of various people and fully participate in character assassinations. Some of it is so petty, and it is so common that I’m afraid the general public actually believes this is "news" simply because "news" is in the name, and that it is "fai…

Pets that go missing have always been something of a mystery, but as urban sprawl and an unchecked proliferation of coydogs collide, evidence of coyotes killing family pets is mounting.

Last winter, residents of Mesa, AZ reported a rash of missing pets. At first the Mesa residents weren’t sure what was ravaging their cuddly pals, until one of them saw a coyote loping down a well-lighted street with a white cat in its mouth. She said she noticed it because a bell on the dead cat’s color…

Appreciation of springs

Water that suddenly appears, whether it trickles, rushes or roars from the ground, is fascinating natural phenomena that people call “springs.”

The water usually is cold, glistening with a pure brilliance and a force that emanates from some mysterious source. They are the architects of subterranean cav…

Groundhogs were thick back in the 1950s. We hunted them back then–even barbecued a few.

Ronnie Tebbe and I hunted them more than most. Of course, we were always hunting something, building something, or planning something grand, which made our mothers nervous and our neighbors cautious.

Ronnie had most of the bright ideas. In fact, he usually announced them by exclaiming with his eyes widened and his voice elevated: "Hey, I’ve got a bright idea."

We weren’t even teenagers…

Tommy Strake was a trapper.

In the little town where I grew up back in the ‘50s, most everyone fished or hunted for sport, and many did both. But Tommy actually made his living off the land, I think.

There were a lot of rumors about Tommy, some of them told to me by my mother in the same tone she used about bats getting tangled in my hair if I stayed out past dark.

Most people avoided him, which I think he preferred, but he was a source of great wonder and curiosity to a…